Second Amendment

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A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

In 1776, America's Founders came together in Philadelphia to draw up a "Declaration of Independence," ending political ties to Great Britain. Written by Thomas Jefferson, it is the fundamental statement of people's rights and what government is and from what source it derives its powers:

WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness--That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed.

The Founders were declaring that we are all equal, and that we are defined by rights that we are born with, not given to us by government. Among those rights is the right to pursue happiness--to live our lives as we think best, as long as we respect the right of all other individuals to do the same. The Founders also declared that governments are created by people to secure their rights. Whatever powers government has are not "just" unless they come from us, the people.

Eleven years later, after the war for independence had been won, our Founders assembled once again to draw up a plan for governing the new nation. That plan would be ratified two years later as the Constitution of the United States of America.

To understand the true meaning of the Second Amendment, it is important to understand the men who wrote and ratified it, and the issues they faced in creating the Constitution. During the debate over the ratification of the Constitution, there was significant concern that a strong federal government would trample on the individual rights of citizens--as had happened under British rule. To protect the basic rights of Americans--rights which each person possesses and that are guaranteed, but not granted, by any government--the framers added the first ten amendments to the Constitution as a package. Those amendments have come to be known as the Bill of Rights. They represent the fundamental freedoms that are at the heart of our society, including freedom of speech, freedom of religion and the right of the people to keep and bear arms.

The History of Our Rights

The British people did not have a written constitution as we have in the United States. However, they did have a tradition of protecting individual rights from government. Those rights were set forth in a number of documents, including the Magna Carta and the English Declaration of Rights. The Founders who wrote the Bill of Rights drew many of their ideas from the traditions of English "common law," which is the body of legal tradition and court decisions that acted as an unwritten constitution and as a balance to the power of English kings. The Founders believed in the basic rights of men as described in written legal documents and in unwritten legal traditions. One of these was the right of the common people to bear arms, which was specifically recognized in the English Declaration of Rights of 1689.

However, the Founders also recognized that without a blueprint for what powers government could exercise, the rights of the people would always be subject to being violated. The Constitution, and particularly the Bill of Rights, was created to specifically describe the powers of government and the rights of individuals government was not allowed to infringe.

1. Does the Second Amendment Describe An Individual Right?

Some people claim that there is no individual right to own firearms. However, anyone familiar with the principles upon which this country was founded will recognize this claim`s most glaring flaw: in America, rights--by definition--belong to individuals.

The Founding Fathers created the Bill of Rights to protect the rights of individuals. The freedoms of religion, speech, association, and the rest all refer to individual liberties. The Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms is no different. When the first Congress penned the Second Amendment in 1789, it took the wording, with some style changes, from a list of rights introduced by James Madison of Virginia. Congressman Madison had promised the Virginia ratifying convention that he would sponsor a Bill of Rights if the Constitution were ratified. The amendments he wrote would not change anything in the original Constitution. Madison repeatedly insisted that nothing in the original Constitution empowered the federal government to infringe on the rights of the people, specifically including the right of individuals to have guns.

In constructing the Bill of Rights, Madison followed the recommendations of the state ratifying conventions. Though they ratified the Constitution, several of those conventions had recommended adding provisions about specific rights. Five conventions recommended adding a right to arms; by comparison, only three conventions mentioned free speech.Members of Congress had no doubt as to the amendment`s meaning. They and their contemporaries were firearm owners, hunters and in some cases gun collectors (George Washington and Thomas Jefferson exchanged letters about their collections). They had just finished winning their freedoms with gun in hand, and would, in their next session, pass legislation requiring most male citizens to buy and own at least one firearm and 30 rounds of ammunition.

The only reason there is a controversy about the Second Amendment is that on this subject many highly vocal and influential 21st Century Americans reject what seemed elementary common sense--and basic principle--to our Founding Fathers. The words of the founders make clear they believed the individual right to own firearms was very important:Thomas Jefferson said, "No free man shall be debarred the use of arms."

Patrick Henry said, "The great object is, that every man be armed."

Richard Henry Lee wrote that, "to preserve liberty it is essential that the whole body of people always possess arms."

Thomas Paine noted, "[A]rms . . . discourage and keep the invader and the plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property."

Samuel Adams warned that: "The said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms."

The Constitution and Bill of Rights repeatedly refer to the "rights" of the people and to the "powers" of government. The Supreme Court has recognized that the phrase "the people," which is used in numerous parts of the Constitution, including the Preamble, the Second, Fourth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments, refers to people as individuals. In each case, rights belonging to "the people" are without question the rights of individuals.

Dozens of essays have been written by the nation`s foremost authorities on the Constitution, supporting the traditional understanding of the right to arms as an individual right, protected by the Second Amendment.

2. Isn't the "well regulated militia" the National Guard?

Gun control supporters insist that "the right of the people" really means the "right of the state" to maintain the "militia," and that this "militia" is the National Guard. This is not only inconsistent with the statements of America`s Founders and the concept of individual rights, it also wrongly defines the term "militia."

Centuries before the Second Amendment was drafted, European political writers used the term "well regulated militia" to refer to all the people, armed with their own firearms or swords, bows or spears, led by officers they chose.

America`s Founders defined the militia the same way. Richard Henry Lee wrote, "A militia when properly formed are in fact the people themselves . . . and include all men capable of bearing arms. . . ." Making the same point, Tench Coxe wrote that the militia "are in fact the effective part of the people at large." George Mason asked, "[W]ho are the militia? They consist now of the whole people, except a few public officers."

The Militia Act of 1792, adopted the year after the Second Amendment was ratified, declared that the Militia of the United States (members of the militia who had to serve if called upon by the government) included all able-bodied adult males. The National Guard was not established until 1903. In 1920 it was designated one part of the "Militia of the United States." The other part included other able-bodied adult men, plus some other men and women.

However, in 1990, the Supreme Court held that the federal government possesses complete power over the National Guard. The Guard is the third part of the United States Army, along with the regular Army and Army Reserve. The Framers` independent "well regulated militia" remains as they intended, America`s armed citizenry.

3. Have the Courts or Congress ever studied the meaning of the Second Amendment?

On June 26, 2008, the Supreme Court issued its decision in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller. In a 5-4 decision, the Court upheld the ruling of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that the Second Amendment protects a right to possess firearms for individuals, and not just a right to have them as part of a militia or the National Guard. The Court also held that the Second Amendment is not meant to protect a “state’s right” to maintain a militia or National Guard.

The decision struck down the District’s bans on handguns and on having any gun in usable condition as violations of the Second Amendment, and prohibited the District from denying a person a permit to carry a firearm within his home on without cause.

Highlights of the majority opinion, written by Justice Antonin Scalia and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas, can be found here: /Issues/FactSheets/Read.aspx?id=235&issue=010.

The Court ruled that “[T]he operative clause [of the Second Amendment] codifies a ‘right of the people.” And went on to explain: “In all six other provisions of the Constitution that mention ‘the people,’ the term unambiguously refers to all members of the political community, not an unspecified subset. . . .’”

Put plainly, the Heller decision says that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess firearms for legal purposes, including for sporting use and for self-defense. In coming to this conclusion, the courts examined the meaning of the words in the Second Amendment, including the meaning of “arms” the phrase “to bear arms” and to “keep “ arms. The court also carefully considered the meaning of “militia” and the relationship between the militia and the “right to keep and bear arms.”

In the majority opinion, the court clearly rejected the idea of a “collective" or group right, that is, a right held by the states. The court found that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess firearms.

The full impact of the Heller decision is still not known. States and cities with restrictive gun laws are now facing challenges to their specific laws and future court cases will continue to define the how the Second Amendment protects individual rights and what types of gun laws will be allowed.

Before the Heller decision, the most thorough examination of the Second Amendment and related issues ever undertaken by a court is the 2001 decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in U.S. v. Emerson. In Emerson, the Appeals court devoted dozens of pages of its decision to studying the Second Amendment’s history and text. It began by examining the Supreme Court’s decision in U.S. v. Miller (1939), which individual rights opponents claim supports the notion of the Second Amendment protecting only a “collective right” of a state to maintain a militia. The Fifth Circuit disagreed. “We conclude that Miller does not support the collective rights or sophisticated collective rights approach to the Second Amendment.”

The court then turned to the history and text of the Second Amendment. “There is no evidence in the text of the Second Amendment, or any other part of the Constitution, that the words ‘the people’ have a different connotation within the Second Amendment than when employed elsewhere in the Constitution. In fact, the text of the Constitution, as a whole, strongly suggests that the words ‘the people’ have precisely the same meaning within the Second Amendment as without. And as used throughout the Constitution, ‘the people’ have ‘rights’ and ‘powers,’ but federal and state governments only have ‘powers’ or ‘authority’, never ‘rights.’”

The court concluded, “We have found no historical evidence that the Second Amendment was intended to convey militia power to the states, limit the federal government’s power to maintain a standing army, or applies only to members of a select militia while on active duty. All of the evidence indicates that the Second Amendment, like other parts of the Bill of Rights, applies to and protects individual Americans. We find that the history of the Second Amendment reinforces the plain meaning of its text, namely that it protects individual Americans in their right to keep and bear arms whether or not they are a member of a select militia or performing active military service or training.”

Four times in American history, Congress has enacted legislation declaring its clear understanding of the Second Amendment`s meaning. Congress has never given any support for the newly minted argument that the amendment fails to protect any right of the people, and instead ensures a “collective right” of states to maintain militias. In 1866, 1941, 1986, and 2005, Congress passed laws to reaffirm this guarantee of personal freedom and to adopt specific safeguards to enforce it.

The Freedmen’s Bureau Act of 1866 was enacted to protect the rights of freed slaves to keep and bear arms following the Civil War and at the outset of the chaotic Reconstruction period. The act declared protection for the “full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty, personal security, and . . . estate . . . including the constitutional right to bear arms. . . .”

The Property Requisition Act of 1941 was intended to reassure Americans that preparations for war would not include repressive or tyrannical policies against firearms owners. It was passed shortly before the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, which led the United States into World War II. The act declared that it would not “authorize the requisitioning or require the registration of any firearms possessed by any individual for his personal protection or sport,” or “to impair or infringe in any manner the right of any individual to keep and bear arms. . . .”

The two more recent laws sought to reverse excesses involving America’s legal system. In the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act of 1986, Congress reacted to overzealous enforcement policies under the federal firearms law: "The Congress finds that the rights of citizens to keep and bear arms under the second amendment to the United States Constitution; to security against illegal and unreasonable searches and seizures under the fourth amendment; against uncompensated taking of property, double jeopardy, and assurance of due process of law under the fifth amendment; and against unconstitutional exercise of authority under the ninth and tenth amendments; require additional legislation to correct existing firearms statutes and enforcement policies. . . ."

And in 2005, as a result of lawsuits aiming to destroy America’s firearms industry, Congress passed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act to end this threat to the Second Amendment. The act begins with findings that go to the heart of the matter: "Congress finds the following: (1) The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. (2) The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution protects the rights of individuals, including those who are not members of a militia or engaged in military service or training, to keep and bear arms."

4. What are "gun control" laws?

"Gun control" is the popular name for laws that regulate, limit or prohibit the purchase and possession of firearms. "Gun control" laws are usually proposed on the grounds they will stop the criminal misuse of firearms, but they are almost never actually targeted at criminals. Supporters of "gun control" most commonly call for laws that restrict law-abiding people, the only ones who will obey them. Laws prohibiting the possession of a firearm are unlikely to stop a person willing to commit robbery, assault or murder. On the other hand, honest citizens who respect the law will submit to the gun control laws, even if the laws do not make them safer.

5. Are gun control laws new?

For centuries there have been efforts to control the possession of arms--whether crossbows, swords or guns--by government authority.

Efforts by English monarchs to limit or prohibit the possession of arms led to protests and revolts against royal power. The English Declaration of Rights of 1689 was the result of one such revolt, and it included the right of the individual to own and bear arms. The American Founders built on that tradition of individual rights when they included the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights.

6. Are firearms ever used to stop crime?

This is an important question that is at the center of much of the debate over firearms and gun laws. Incidents in which firearms are misused, whether accidentally or by criminals, "make the news." Cases of people who have escaped harm because they had access to firearms are not so easy to record. Any ban on firearms is unlikely to prevent criminals from getting them. Even in places where firearms, particularly handguns, are banned--both here in the United States and internationally--criminals continue to get and misuse guns in crimes. The most direct impact of gun bans has been to disarm law-abiding people.

So, are guns used to stop crimes? Professor Gary Kleck of Florida State University has provided the best answer to this. An award-winning expert on crime, Prof. Kleck has conducted extensive survey research to measure firearms ownership and use in America. He found that firearms were used as often as 2.5 million times a year for protection--three to five times more often, he says, than they are used for criminal purposes. In the vast majority of these protective cases, the gun is not fired.

7. Does the Second Amendment apply to modern guns the same way it applied to flintlocks?Isn't the Second Amendment dated and obsolete?

Just as the First Amendment applies to the modern printing press and the Internet, the Second Amendment applies to modern firearms. The most important aspect of the Second Amendment is the philosophy on which it is founded: that all free people have the right to defend themselves, their families, communities and nation. In 1789 it applied to the freedom to keep and bear arms just as it does today. The technological advances of the past two centuries do not make that principle obsolete, any more than computerized printing cancels the First Amendment.

8. Isn't the Second Amendment just about protecting guns for hunting?

The Second Amendment is not about hunting at all. The Second Amendment is about protecting the right of a free people to defend that freedom and to protect their families and communities from threats. The Founders, who all considered themselves English citizens, had seen the British army disarm the public. They believed this was an improper use of government power. In writing the Constitution, they included the Second Amendment to prohibit the American government from doing what the British had done.

Hunting is an important American tradition and is the most effective wildlife management tool available. Firearms ownership is critical if hunting is to continue. So the fight to protect Second Amendment rights has the benefit of protecting this American sporting tradition.

9. Shouldn't we at least try some gun control to see if it works?

We have. Over the past century, all types of gun control laws have been implemented in different parts of the United States. Everything from purchase restrictions to complete gun bans has been tried. These laws have not worked, and in some cases have had the opposite effect from what was intended.

Some big cities have strict gun laws. New York City has very strict gun laws, more strict than the rest of the state of New York. In spite of this, New York has always had significantly higher violent crime rates. Washington, D.C. and Chicago, Ill. have banned the ownership of handguns, and both these cities have much higher violent crime rates than the surrounding areas.

States such as Illinois and New York have gun owner licensing. Other states, such as Hawaii, have gun registration. However, none of these laws led to reductions in violent crime rates. And that is the real test of gun control laws. Do crime rates fall after gun laws are passed? The clear answer is no. Gun control has been tested, and it has failed the test.

10. If there are more guns, won't we have more crime?

Many areas with high percentages of gun owners are some of the most crime free areas in the nation. The simple presence of a gun, or many guns, does not lead to crime. Most of the states with higher per capita legal gun ownership have the lowest rates of violent crime, while states with lower per capita gun ownership have much higher violent crime rates. The real answer to reducing crime is not passing gun laws, but solving other problems that really do lead to high crime rates. Gun control diverts attention from the roots of the crime problem.

11. Don't we need gun control to stop firearm accidents?

The truth is that in the past seventy years, while the U.S. population has more than doubled and the number of firearms owned by Americans has gone up five times, fatal firearm accidents have been cut by 76%. The most important factor in reducing firearms accidents is proper education on the safe handling and storage of firearms. NRA, the leading pro-gun ownership rights group in the nation, has spent over a century teaching firearm safety.

Firearms accidents can always be reduced further, but their numbers are far below many other common mishaps including drownings, falls and poisonings. Gun accidents account for only 0.7% of accidental deaths.

12. Wouldn't we be safer if we banned guns?

To some people, banning guns sounds like a perfect way to make the world safer. However, proponents of gun bans ignore two important facts. Criminals ignore gun bans, and law-abiding people will be even more at risk with no effective means of self-defense.

The British experience with gun bans is a perfect example. Over the past 20 years, Great Britain has banned handguns and many long guns. During that same period violent crime has increased dramatically. One significant area where crime has risen sharply in England is home burglaries where the occupants are present. Since they know the residents will not be armed, thieves more openly enter even occupied homes, often during daylight hours. This has resulted in more violence against victims who try to defend their homes.

In general, the crime rates of Canada, Britain, and Australia, all of which have implemented strict gun control laws, have risen significantly after the passage of these laws. At the same time, the U.S. has seen a significant drop in violent crime rates.

The evidence shows that firearm ownership, including handguns, does not lead to increased crime rates, and gun bans do not deter criminals from committing violent crimes. In fact, ownership of firearms deters crime.

13. Shouldn't we at least ban handguns?

The important truth is: criminals do not want to attack armed citizens. The only real impact of a handgun ban is to insure that law-abiding citizens are disarmed, leaving them more at the mercy of illegally armed criminals. Cities such as Washington D.C. and Chicago have banned handguns, and violent crime has not been eliminated, or even reduced.

14. Who can buy a firearm? Can just anyone own a gun?

Federal law says that certain people cannot buy or possess any firearm. This includes convicted felons, fugitives from the law and people found mentally incompetent by a court. A licensed dealer may not sell handguns to people under the age of 21 or long guns to people under the age of 18.

In addition, under federal law, a person under age 18 may not possess a handgun or handgun ammunition, and it is illegal for a person to provide a handgun or handgun ammunition to a person under age 18, except for target shooting, hunting, or certain other exempted purposes. Additional restrictions are also imposed by individual states and localities.

15. Doesn't the public have a right to know who owns a gun?

Gun registration and owner licensing don`t help police solve crime. Criminals do not register their guns or get licenses. On the other hand, gun registration lists have been used to confiscate citizens` firearms in cities like New York and in states such as California.16. We license drivers, shouldn't we license gun owners?

Driving a car is not a constitutional right. People drive on the public roads as a privilege provided by the community. The community sets standards for drivers that everyone has to meet to make the roads safe. Firearm ownership is a constitutional right, and that means government has very limited power to restrict it. Gun owner licensing has little, if any, real value in preventing crime, but has proven time and again to set the stage for infringement on the right to own a firearm.

American gun owners know their concerns about licensing are not unfounded, because they know the history of gun control in Great Britain. After passage of the Firearms Act of 1920, Britons suddenly could possess pistols and rifles only if they proved they had "good reason" for receiving a police permit. Then, in 1936, the British police began regulating how people stored their guns.

As the public grew accustomed to gun licensing, the licensing requirements got stricter. The British gun owners got used to higher and higher levels of control. The result was a total ban on the possession of handguns and many types of rifle and shotguns. When the gun bans became law, no one remembered that the 1920 gun bill was only supposed "to prevent criminals and persons of that description from being able to have revolvers and to use them."

17. What should we do about gun shows where people don't have to obey all the regular gun laws?

The "gun show loophole" is a myth created by anti-gun activists to advance their political agenda. There is no loophole. All gun sales or transfers are subject to state and federal laws. All licensed firearm dealers must complete the process provided for by state and federal law--a process that includes completion of forms and a background check on the buyer--before a gun can be sold. This is true no matter where the sale takes place, at a gun store or at a gun show.

Federal law also regulates sales of firearms between private individuals. It is a serious crime to sell a firearm to someone who is not a resident of the same state as the seller.

18. Don't we need to have mandatory safety training to buy a gun?

The problem with mandatory gun safety training is that it can so easily be used to interfere with someone`s choice to own a firearm. "Safety" training can be used improperly to infringe on the right to keep and bear arms. Anti-gun politicians and government officials can use such laws to require unreasonable levels of training. Making people attend 30, 40 or more hours of "safety" training before they can buy a gun will prevent many people from owning a firearm. The costs of these classes also have been a deterrent, particularly to lower income people.

19. Why does anyone need an "assault weapon"?

This question is often used to justify laws restricting firearms ownership. So-called "assault weapons" are just one example. Why does anyone need a handgun? Why does anyone need a semi-auto shotgun? The real question we ask is, "Why does government need to restrict this right for law-abiding citizens?" In a free society the government has to prove it needs to restrict the basic rights of the people. The government that can restrict a right based on "need" can restrict any right. That is not a free society.

Banning guns because some criminals use them tells all honest citizens that their rights and liberties depend not on their own conduct but on the behavior of the lawless. It tells the law-abiding that they have only such rights and liberties as criminals will allow.

20. Isn't it clear that America needs a national gun policy?

It has one: the federal Gun Control Act of 1968, a massive set of restrictions on who may sell, buy and own firearms, how sales may occur, and what kinds of firearms may be sold. There are severe penalties for violations of these laws, but they have to be enforced. And, of course, each state and the District of Columbia and many cities and towns have laws governing the purchase, possession, and use of firearms. All told, there are tens of thousands of federal, state and local gun laws on the books.

For more information on topics discussed in this brochure, the following bibliography is provided:

For more information on the constitutionality of gun laws, see:Caplan, David I., "Handgun Control: Constitutional or Unconstitutional?," North Carolina Central Law Journal, 5 (1976): 53-58.Cottrol, Robert J., ed., Gun Control and the Constitution: Sources and Explorations on the Second Amendment, New York, Garland Publishing, Inc., 1994.Kates, Don B., Jr., "Handgun Prohibition and The Original Meaning of the Second Amendment," Michigan Law Review, 82 (1983): 204.Kopel, David B., "The Supreme Court`s Thirty-Five Other Gun Cases: What The Supreme Court Has Said About The Second Amendment," Saint Louis University Public Law Review, 1999: 99-187.For more information on crime statistics, see:Bureau of Justice Statistics, "Guns Used in Crime," July 1995FBI, Uniform Crime Reports, Crime in the United States, Published each year.For more information on the effectiveness of gun laws, see:Kates, Don B. Jr., et al., "Problematic Arguments for Banning Handguns," Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy 1997 Pp. 31-49 in D.B. Kates and G. Kleck, eds., The Great American Gun Debate: Essays on Firearms and Violence. San Francisco: Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy.Kates, Don B., Jr., Guns, Murders, and the Constitution: A Realistic Assessment of Gun Control, Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, 1990.Kleck, Gary, Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control, Hawthorne, N.Y.: Aldine de Gruyter, 1997.Polsby, Daniel D., "The False Promise of Gun Control," Atlantic Monthly, 273 (1994): 57.The Great American Gun Debate: Essays on Firearms and Violence, San Francisco: Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, 1997Nisbet, Lee, editor, The Gun Control Debate: You Decide, Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1990;Wright, James D., "Second Thoughts About Gun Control," Public Interest, No. 91 (1988): 23-39.For more information on general constitutional issues, see:Amar, Akil Reed and Alan Hirsch, For the People: What the Constitution Really Says About Your Rights, N.Y.: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1998.Amar, Akhil Reed, "The Bill of Rights as a Constitution," Yale Law Journal, 100 (1990): 1131-1164.Caplan, David I., "Restoring the Balance: Second Amendment Revisited," Fordham Urban Law Journal, 5 (1976): 31-53.Halbrook, Stephen P., A Right to Bear Arms: State and Federal Bills of Rights and Constitutional Guarantees, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press (1989).Polsby, Daniel D., "Second Reading: Treating the Second Amendment as Normal Constitutional Law," Reason, March ,1996, 32-36.Wright, James D., "Ten Essential Observations on Guns in America," Society, March-April, 1995, 62-67.For more information on history of firearms rights, see:Cottrol, Robert J. & Raymond T. Diamond, "The Second Amendment: Toward an Afro-Americanist Reconsiderations," Georgetown Law Journal, 1991, 309-361Cramer, Clayton E., "The Racist Roots of Gun Control," Kansas Journal of Law & Public Policy, Winter 1995, at 17.U.S. Senate, Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, The Right to Keep and Bear Arms, 97th Cong., 2d sess., 1982.Halbrook, Stephen P., Origin and Development of the Second Amendment, Southport, Conn.: Blacksmith Corporation, 1986.Halbrook, Stephen P., That Every Man Be Armed--The Evolution of a Constitutional Right, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984.Malcolm, Joyce Lee, To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994.Malcolm, Joyce Lee, "The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms: The Common Law Tradition," Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, 10 (1983): 285-314.For more information on the individual right to bear arms, see:Bordenet, Bernard J., "The Right to Possess Arms: The Intent of the Framers of the Second Amendment," University of West Los Angeles Law Review, 21 (1990).Cantrell, Charles L., "The Right of the Individual to Bear Arms," Wisconsin Bar Bulletin, 53 (Oct. 1980): 21.Caplan, David I., "The Right of the Individual to Bear Arms: A Recent Judicial Trend," Detroit College of Law Review, (1982): 789-823.Cramer, Clayton E., For the Defense of Themselves and the State: The Original Intent and Judicial Interpretation of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, Westport, Conn., Praeger Press, 1994.Halbrook, Stephen P., "Congress Interprets the Second Amendment: Declarations by a Co-Equal Branch on the Individual Right to Keep and Bear Arms," Tennessee Law Review, 62 (1995): 597.Halbrook, Stephen P., "Personal Security, Personal Liberty, and `The Constitutional Right to Bear Arms`: Visions of the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment," 5 Seton Hall Constitutional Law Journal 341-434 (1995).Levinson, Sanford, "The Embarrassing Second Amendment," Yale Law Journal, 99 (1989): 637.U.S. Senate, Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, The Right to Keep and Bear Arms, 97th Cong., 2d sess., 1982.Van Alstyne, William, "The Second Amendment and the Personal Right to Arms," 43 Duke Law Journal 1236-1255 (1994)For more information on international gun laws, see:van Kesteren, John, Pat Mayhew and Paul Nieuwbeerta, "Criminal Victimization in Seventeen Industrialized Countries: Key findings from the 2000 International Crime Victims Survey," the Hague, Ministry of Justice, WODC, Onderzoek en beleid, nr. 187, 2000.Kopel, David B., The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy: Should America Adopt the Gun Controls of Other Democracies?, Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1992.For more information on the Second Amendment and Crime, see:Kleck, Gary, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, Hawthorne, N.Y.: Aldine de Gruyter, 1991.Lott, John R., Jr., More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws, Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1998.Sheley, Joseph F. and James D. Wright, In the Line of Fire: Youth, Guns, and Violence in Urban America, N.Y.: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995;Wright, James D., and Peter H. Rossi, Armed and Considered Dangerous: A Survey of Felons and Their Firearms, New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1986.Wright, James D., et al., Under the Gun: Weapons, Crime and Violence in America, New York: Aldine Publishing Co., 1983.For more information on the Founders` intent, see:Halbrook, Stephen P., "The Right of the People or the Power of the State: Bearing Arms, Arming Militias, and the Second Amendment," Valparaiso Law Review, 26 (1991): 131-207.Halbrook, Stephen P., "What the Framers Intended: A Linguistic Analysis of the Right to ’Bear Arms,`"; Law & Contemporary Problems, 49 (1986): 151.

Established in 1975, the Institute for Legislative Action (ILA) is the "lobbying" arm of the National Rifle Association of America. ILA is responsible for preserving the right of all law-abiding individuals in the legislative, political, and legal arenas, to purchase, possess and use firearms for legitimate purposes as guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.